‘Angela?’
There were tears in her voice.
‘Uh, so, Mason and I had a disagreement at dinner,’ she choked. ‘And he left and I don’t know what to do and he won’t answer the phone and yeah, can you call me?’
I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall as the second message began to play. This was not good.
‘Hey, it’s me,’ she shouted over loud guitar music. ‘I don’t want you to panic but the wedding is off.’
Why did people insist on telling you not to panic when the only rational response to what they’re about to say is panic?
‘Is that Angela?’ Another familiar voice came on the line and my heart all but stopped. ‘Hey, Angela!’
‘Shut up,’ Jenny hissed at her companion. ‘It’s OK, I’m OK. I just, it’s off. The whole thing is off.’
Oh, sweet baby Jesus in the manger. The other voice on the line sounded far too familiar.
‘I should have known I could never have anything that good,’ she said, tears cutting through her words. ‘Can you call me when you get this? I love you, Angie.’
A loud, Lopez sob was abruptly cut off as she ended the call, right as the music faded out around me. With my phone still pressed against my ear, I looked up to see Cici on the stage.
‘Good evening, Generation Gloss,’ she spoke into the microphone on stage with an easy grace, her expensive education carrying her words across the room. ‘I’d like to welcome to the stage the editor of Gloss magazine, Angela Clark.’
She stepped back and began to clap, nodding for me to join her. Slowly, the whole room followed suit until the applause was deafening and somewhere in the back corner I was certain I could hear James whooping loudly and screaming my name, even as Jenny’s words echoed in my ears. With my phone in my hand, I climbed up the steps and crossed the stage, wearing a waist-length white blonde braided wig and quite clearly dressed as Daenerys Targaryen. Unsurprisingly, the applause faded out quite quickly.
‘Hi, everyone,’ I said, my amplified voice not quite drowning out the mutter of comments that swept through the crowd. I blinked out into the venue as a spotlight repositioned itself to shine right in my eyes. ‘I know we all want to get back to having a good time so I’ll keep it quick.’
‘Thank fuck!’ James bellowed.
‘When my friends and I created Gloss, we wanted to make a magazine that was for us and for you,’ I said, trying to remember the speech I’d written days ago but my brain was a complete blank. All I could think about was Jenny, god knows where, doing god knows what with the worst person possible. ‘We wanted a smart, savvy magazine that was fun to read, made us laugh and made us think. Basically, we wanted to know who was feuding with whom on Twitter but we didn’t want to feel as though we needed to take a shower after we’d read it.’
A brief titter of laughter fluttered across the room.
‘I’m proud of Gloss,’ I said, inadvertently meeting Joe’s eyes. He had taken my spot in the booth and James had his arm wrapped around his broad shoulders. ‘And I’m proud to celebrate it with you all tonight.’
‘Where are my dragons?’ James screamed.
Joe winced.
I smiled.
Leaning in to the mic to finish my speech, I cleared my throat but before I could speak, the speakers squealed with echoing feedback as my phone began to ring. It was Jenny again. I looked at it for a moment before cancelling the call as everyone in the room pressed their fingers into their ears.
‘I’m now going to hand back to the person who planned this entire evening, Cici Spencer,’ I said, stepping out of the spotlight and waving her back onto the stage. ‘Can we get a round of applause for Cici?’
To be filed under ‘things I never thought I would say’.
Pushing her into the spotlight, I gave Cici a small hug.
‘I’ve got to go, I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘This is amazing, thank you.’
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, her voice packed with seemingly genuine concern. ‘Is there a problem with the baby?’
I shook my head as my phone began to vibrate again.
‘There is a problem with a baby,’ I replied, striding across the stage and yanking the wig off as I went. ‘Just not mine.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Walking into a ridiculously cool party dressed as a character from a television fantasy show had been embarrassing. The idea of walking into a super-hipster bar in Williamsburg was mortifying.
‘ID?’ A greasy-haired man sat on a bar stool flashed a tiny torch up into my face.
‘I don’t have it,’ I replied, waiting for his sarcastic response. I just wanted to get this over with. ‘But I’m definitely over twenty-one.’
‘K,’ he replied, turning his torch back onto his book, a tattered copy of a Bukowski novel, and kicking the door open. ‘Cool outfit.’
Well, maybe this wasn’t going to be as difficult as I’d expected.
The Drill was the diviest of dive bars on all of Driggs Avenue and Craig’s favourite Brooklyn haunt. Nine on a Saturday evening was early for hipsters, but the cracked vinyl booths that lined the right side of the room were already full, and to the left, a tattooed bartender lined up shots along the old wooden bar. The Velvet Underground blared out of the speakers, making conversation all but impossible. In the back, the pool table was silently spoken for, stacks of quarters lining the bumper from one corner pocket to the other.
Not a single person looked up from their table as I shuffled through the bar. If a grown woman had walked into a Manhattan bar in full Game of Thrones cosplay, on her own, on a Saturday night, I would definitely have raised an eyebrow. At The Drill, no one so much as blinked. Being cool must be exhausting.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim light and a minute longer to spot Jenny. I looked ridiculous, Jenny looked like she’d been transported in from another dimension. Everyone in the bar was wearing battered jeans and faded T-shirts or vintage floral dresses with black tights and ripped jumpers that looked like they’d been hand-knitted by their nanas. But Jenny sparkled in a silver sequin Alice + Olivia mini dress and sky-high over-the-knee boots I recognized from the latest Stuart Weitzman ad campaign. At the very back of the room, behind the pool table and tucked in beside a vintage Ms Pacman machine, she shone at a tiny table for two, covered in crumpled cans and empty shot glasses and, most worryingly of all, Craig.
‘Right.’ I marched up to the table and slammed my wig down on the sticky surface. So now I knew how it would look if Johnny Rotten had ever dated a Kardashian. ‘You’re coming with me.’
‘Hey, Angie!’ Craig leapt up out of his seat and threw his arms around me. He wasn’t a bad man, just a stupid one. It wasn’t his fault Jenny had dragged him into her spiral of self-sabotage but he certainly wasn’t doing anything to get her out of it. ‘Great outfit. What are you drinking?’
‘A cup of tea, in my pyjamas, in my own home, in approximately fifteen minutes from now,’ I replied, grabbing Jenny by the arm and hoisting her onto her feet. ‘Lopez, up.’
‘Get off me!’ she squealed, pushing me away and falling backwards, back into her chair. ‘I’m staying here. I don’t want to go home.’
‘I don’t give two shits about what you want,’ I replied. There was a time for hugs and tears and that would come later. This was the time for tough love and when it came to telling her how it was, I’d learned from the best. ‘This is insane, and I’m not going to let you do it.’
‘Me and Craig are having some drinks,’ she said, over-enunciating every word, and I could tell she was already well on her way to being wasted. ‘And then we’re gonna go back to his place. Right, baby?’
‘Sure?’ he grinned like the cat that had got the canary. Or the cat who was on a promise with his really hot ex-girlfriend, who had recently got engaged to a much more suitable cat. ‘Whenever you’re ready, babe.’
‘Craig,’ I said, taking Jenny’s arm once more and pulling her away from the table
, ‘don’t be an arse.’
Jenny fought back, but not well, either because she knew I was right or because she was bladdered, I wasn’t sure.
‘I’m not going home,’ she wailed as I dragged her into the disgusting unisex toilet stall and pushed her backwards onto the loo. Her eyes were glazed and her perfect make-up was smudged all over her face. ‘I can’t go home. Leave me here with Craig. I deserve to be here with Craig.’
‘You know, I probably should,’ I said, turning on the cold tap and waiting for the slightly orange water to run clear. ‘But this is going to be a lot easier to fix tomorrow if we stop the madness now. Look at me.’
She pouted as I grabbed her chin and pulled her head away, immediately head-butting the dark red painted wall. I grabbed a handful of toilet paper, grateful it was still so early in the night and there was even any left, and wet it before dabbing gently at the trails of mascara streaking her cheeks.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I ordered, kneeling down in front of her as her bottom lip began to tremble.
‘He doesn’t want to marry me,’ she stuttered. ‘He walked out of the restaurant.’
‘And what happened before that?’ I asked as I smoothed her hair behind her ears and away from her face.
Jenny covered her eyes with her hands and peeled away a pair of extravagant false eyelashes before chucking them in the overflowing bin.
‘We were talking about the wedding,’ she said. ‘And I was suggesting some stuff, Angie, nothing crazy.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I replied, not quite sure I believed her.
‘And he flipped out,’ she sniffed, her voice wavering as the shots hit her system. ‘Out of nowhere. Everyone was staring at us.’
Well, I knew all about that, I thought, looking down at my outfit.
‘He started ranting about how much I was spending, how I was trying to bankrupt him, how I cared more about the wedding than I did about marrying him and that I was only trying to one up Sadie which, you know, is insane.’
‘Completely mad,’ I agreed. We’d do rational and honest once she sobered up.
‘I love him, I love him so much,’ she cried, a fresh course of tears pouring down her cheeks. ‘I just want him to know how much I love him, I want everyone to know.’
‘And did you tell him that?’ I asked.
Jenny looked at me guiltily. ‘More or less.’
‘Jenny?’
There was that tone of voice again. Just like my mother.
‘OK, so I kind of told him he was ruining everything,’ she said. ‘And that I hated him and wasn’t even sure I wanted to marry him anyway.’
‘And that’s your version of more or less?’ I asked.
She pressed her hands against her face and let out a fresh stream of tears.
‘Admittedly, it probably wasn’t the best thing you could have said,’ I said as I rubbed my hand in circles up and down her back, ever the diplomat. ‘But we all say things when we’re upset.’
‘And then I took off my ring and threw it in his face,’ she wailed. ‘Angie, what have I done? I told you he didn’t want to marry me.’
Oh, bloody hell.
‘He’s been weird all week. He hasn’t been texting, he won’t talk to me about work, he’s cancelling on wedding planning stuff,’ Jenny continued to sob, hot tears carving a path through the rest of her make-up. ‘I forced him into it, I know I did, and now he’s having second thoughts. Now everything is “whatever” and I hate it. I never should have pushed him.’
‘Jenny, I’m sitting on the floor of a dirty bar bathroom, dressed as a woman who considers three dragons to be her children,’ I said, unable to listen to it for another second, ‘and I’m just not having this. Genuinely, truly, tell me now, what is going on?’
‘I told you,’ she said, snorting back tears. ‘It’s not me, it’s Mason. I want to give him this awesome wedding so I can show him how much I love him and he doesn’t want to marry me at all. That’s why he wants to hide away on some island, so he can pretend it isn’t really happening. I should have stuck with Craig. I should have known better than to think someone like Mason would ever want to be with me. I don’t deserve him and he knows it. All I deserve is too-drunk-to-stand, too-lame-to-live Craig and his herpes.’
‘Did I know Craig had herpes?’ I asked, thanking my lucky stars that Alex had been so careful when he was in his ‘I’m with a band’ shagger phase. ‘Ignore me, that’s not the point. You’re wrong. No one deserves Craig, not even his herpes. Just because Mason has been busy and doesn’t want to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a wedding does not mean he doesn’t love you. Also, not to go off topic, but have you got any idea how much he’s already spent on that ring?’
She splayed out her naked left hand and began to cry again.
‘This is going to sound like a daft question, but have you tried calling him?’ I asked, covering her hand with mine.
‘I called and he hung up,’ she hiccupped. ‘He hates me. ‘He told me not to call him again.’
‘He doesn’t hate you.’ I grabbed her as she rolled forward off the lav and into my arms. ‘I bet he’s hiding out somewhere, just as upset as you are right now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, sobbing onto my silk dress until it was wet through, ‘he told me to fuck off.’
‘We’ll maybe give him a bit of time to cool off, then, shall we?’ I suggested. ‘But I think it’s time we go home.’
Waiting for Jenny to cry herself out, I turned my attention to the graffiti carved into the dark red walls. Why were so many toilets in New York painted red? It couldn’t be for the romance factor. Maybe it stimulated deep, theoretical debates. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say at least 50 per cent of the most important conversations in human history must have taken place in the toilets.
‘What about Craig?’ Jenny said, as she calmed down. She smeared her make-up across the backs of her hands just in time to make way for new tears. ‘I called him and asked him to meet me. I’m such a dick, Angie. Why did I do that?’
‘Because you’re human?’ I suggested.
‘Stop being nice to me,’ she said into my boobs.
‘Because you’re an idiot who is determined to ruin her life?’ I corrected.
Her shoulders shook with a half laugh, half wail.
‘I know it’s dumb but one of the things that really weirds me out about getting married,’ she said, ‘is the lack of drama. And not even real drama, but the po- tential for drama. I love Mason, I would never, ever cheat on him, but when Craig shows up on the doorstep or guys hit on me when I’m in the gym, it’s still exciting … am I a terrible person?’
‘People hit on you when you’re in the gym?’ I asked, marvelling at the concept. When I exercised, I turned into a human blueberry. No one had ever so much as asked me the time when I was in the gym. ‘Sorry, distracted. No, I don’t think you’re a terrible person. You might be a slightly sketchy feminist, but I don’t have the most up-to-date guidelines on that, so you could be in the clear.’
‘I wouldn’t ever do anything,’ she insisted, pulling at her sheer, golden tights. ‘But it’s just that little buzz of knowing that you could. I guess maybe my brain hasn’t caught up with my ring finger and it’s still trying to keep my options open.’
‘That’s one theory,’ I agreed. ‘Another would be that you’ve been dating for so long, you don’t know how to accept that this is it and move on to the next thing. Sound like a possibility?’
‘So, you have read Keeping the Love You Find,’ she said, momentarily delighted. ‘Such a great book.’
I smiled and nodded, even though I’d only really read the first three chapters and then used it to prop up a bookcase that was standing on top of uneven floorboards.
‘Mason is some sort of gorgeous, CrossFit-obsessed yeti,’ I told her. ‘By all laws of science and nature he should not exist. He is a prince among men and Jen, you kissed every frog in the Tri-State area before you found him.’
&nbs
p; ‘And some from Canada,’ she reminded me.
‘And some from Canada,’ I amended my statement. Oh, Jacques of Montreal, how I did not miss thee. ‘Mason is not going to turn back into a frog so you don’t need to keep one foot in the pond.’
‘It’s a pretty nasty pond,’ she said, perking up all of a sudden. ‘Want to go home and play a fun game called Delete the Numbers of All Jenny’s Exes?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. I’d been waiting to play this game for years. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘OK.’
She looked up, mascara drawn all across her face like a Batman mask and her lip began to quiver.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, looking around our location. ‘Apart from the obvious.’
‘I don’t want to talk to Craig,’ she whimpered.
‘No one does,’ I assured her. ‘Is there a back exit?’
‘There’s a window?’ she said, pointing at the small square of glass above us.
‘I’m not climbing out of a window,’ I said, helping her up to her feet. ‘I am too tired and too pregnant for that. I’m going to open the door, we’re going to walk out into the bar, you’re going to apologize for calling him, explain it was a mistake and we’re going to pray a taxi will agree to let us in and take us home. I am not getting on the subway like this.’
‘Yeah,’ Jenny replied as someone began to hammer on the outside of the door. ‘I guess that would be the adult thing to do.’
‘Yes, it would,’ I confirmed, pleased she’d come around so quickly. ‘Are you ready?’
She looked longingly at the window.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Sorry.’
‘Fine,’ I said, bending over and giving her a leg up onto the window ledge. ‘I’ll get your handbag.’
Opening the door, I legged it across the bar and nabbed Jenny’s vintage Fendi baguette from the disgusting bar table.
‘Hi, Craig,’ I said as I stalked past. ‘Bye, Craig.’
‘Wait!’ He looked at me then looked at the empty bathroom stall. ‘What happened to Jenny?’